PNG

ajt on 2003-03-05T19:02:40

Today we were doing lots of bug fixing on our Web Service Management system. Lots of strange problems got fixed at the SAP end (very strange product that), and I'd missed something out of a Perl password management tool.

While we were doing all this I got involved in a discussion with our graphic artist/web designer over making some menus translucent, he didn't know how to do it, and I suggested using a PNG with some transparency. He's a bit of a Microsoftie, and it took a while to get Photoshop to do the right thing, but then he was very disappointed as IE6 just showed a solid block of colour. Naturally it works fine on modern browsers like Mozilla....

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designers & macs

ajtaylor on 2003-03-05T19:23:50

I thought most design folks used Macs. I've known more than a few designers who embodied the phrase "You can pry my Mac from my cold, dead fingers.". Is the tide beginning to turn, or is your guy just odd? ;-)

Re:designers & macs

ajt on 2003-03-05T22:19:23

I think our guy is odd. When he finished his Fine Art degree he started to look at computers and computer design and decided to specialise on PCs as it was a niche skill. Now he is very happy as most customers (he's a contractor) don't like a token Mac on a mostly NT/2K network, very much the case at our place.

We have another contractor, a font designer in at the moment, and he is more Mac literate, but he also said he gets more PC based work than Mac these days. Interestingly he runs MacOS X at home, and rather likes it, and is from what I've gathered, starting to look underneath the pretty skin at the wondrous Unix underpinnings in there.

As I've said before I can't see many people switching from XP to Mac, but it looks very appealing for a lot of Linux users, and NT/Linux hybrid users like myself. You only have to read people's journals round here to see that OS X has a lot of followers that Jobs probably wasn't expecting.

PNG in IE

malte on 2003-03-06T08:18:21

While I agree that IE's behavior sucks, there is a very beautiful workaround for the problem here. Although it states it only works with IE 5.5+ my Virtual PC Windows 98 IE 5.000000001 installation seems to be quite happy with it.

Re:PNG in IE

ajt on 2003-03-06T09:17:08

Thanks for the link. Works well on IE6 as well. Once I saw this, I remembered a similar article over on the excellent A List Apart discussing Cross Browser Variable Opacity with PNG.

If only IE was more like Opera or Mozilla...........

Re:PNG in IE

entropic on 2003-03-11T22:14:07

there is a petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/msiepng/petition.html

png support page has good juice on the problem: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html